Owners of A4 General Discussion and Help

[CritterDog]

I'm assuming you were part of the pre-order on bitcointalk, but if not, head over to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1523298.600 where there is active discussion going on about A4s.

BTW, I would suggest that you stabilize your machine at Nicehash, then when working, switch back. I'm a 100% Prohashing fan and only switch to NH when I need to troubleshoot. You'll find in Gentarkin's tuning instructions sites there are even more stable sites. Best to eliminate as many variables when troubleshooting and having a "stable" hashrate is a good baseline. Maximize your profits later.

No was not part of the pre-order.. And I don't care for Nicehash it does not pay as good as Prohash so will continue to trouble shoot here. The A4 worked fine the first 24 hours. I didn't change anything.. I can get steady stable hash rate over at litcoinpool so the problem is something here

I know that Chris is working on this, but try using g=off and see what that does.

It will reduce your profits, but if it stabilizes the hashrate, it might clue us into the problem.

Been running steady most the day today with d=8192 right at 250Mhs 100 percent efficient according to your pool meter. It seems to be ok for at least 2 hours and after 2 hours is when it sometimes acts up.. But overall today was a better day. Got the restarts back down to around .5 .7 seconds great improvement there it takes sometimes 45 minutes before the re-starts get under 1 second I dont know why that is. Sometimes on a re-boot it will start mining under 1 sec but most times it takes it mining for 45 mins to get from 5 sec restart down to under 1 second.. Right now I am at 251Mhs and restart is .70 efficiency 100 percent at d=8192 1 and a half hours in. So looking better.. Thanks Steve

[Steve Sokolowski]

No was not part of the pre-order.. And I don't care for Nicehash it does not pay as good as Prohash so will continue to trouble shoot here. The A4 worked fine the first 24 hours. I didn't change anything.. I can get steady stable hash rate over at litcoinpool so the problem is something here

I know that Chris is working on this, but try using g=off and see what that does.

It will reduce your profits, but if it stabilizes the hashrate, it might clue us into the problem.

Been running steady most the day today with d=8192 right at 250Mhs 100 percent efficient according to your pool meter. It seems to be ok for at least 2 hours and after 2 hours is when it sometimes acts up.. But overall today was a better day. Got the restarts back down to around .5 .7 seconds great improvement there it takes sometimes 45 minutes before the re-starts get under 1 second I dont know why that is. Sometimes on a re-boot it will start mining under 1 sec but most times it takes it mining for 45 mins to get from 5 sec restart down to under 1 second.. Right now I am at 251Mhs and restart is .70 efficiency 100 percent at d=8192 1 and a half hours in. So looking better.. Thanks Steve

Are you saying that this is working when you tried "g=off," or just under normal conditions?

[CritterDog]

I have not tried the g=off because today it was doing well but after about 2 hours it starts dropping hash rate. Does not make since. I will try g=off right now and report back.. I do notice 80 percent of the time it seems I am only mining Gamcredit it always comes back to game credit. Don't know if that means anything. OK going to reboot now with g=off as hash rate has dropped again. The restarts seem to be much better now so if all g=off is effecting is restarts that is not the issue

[Chris Sokolowski]

Can you track at exactly what time the hashrate drops? I would like to look at the database around that time and see what is happening. Maybe I can correlate it with pool conditions and try to come up with an explanation.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I have not tried the g=off because today it was doing well but after about 2 hours it starts dropping hash rate. Does not make since. I will try g=off right now and report back.. I do notice 80 percent of the time it seems I am only mining Gamcredit it always comes back to game credit. Don't know if that means anything. OK going to reboot now with g=off as hash rate has dropped again. The restarts seem to be much better now so if all g=off is effecting is restarts that is not the issue

That's all g=off would affect, so most likely it will not cause you increased hashrate in that case. I didn't think it would solve the problem anyway, but it was worth a shot.

Get back to Chris with the exact times the problem is occurring and he'll try to cross-reference what was going on in the database to see if any of the errors are pertinent to you.

[CritterDog]

I have not tried the g=off because today it was doing well but after about 2 hours it starts dropping hash rate. Does not make since. I will try g=off right now and report back.. I do notice 80 percent of the time it seems I am only mining Gamcredit it always comes back to game credit. Don't know if that means anything. OK going to reboot now with g=off as hash rate has dropped again. The restarts seem to be much better now so if all g=off is effecting is restarts that is not the issue

That's all g=off would affect, so most likely it will not cause you increased hashrate in that case. I didn't think it would solve the problem anyway, but it was worth a shot.

Get back to Chris with the exact times the problem is occurring and he'll try to cross-reference what was going on in the database to see if any of the errors are pertinent to you.

Hi Steve I wrote Chis last night.. It seems my router has gone out completely. I am dead in the water on the A4 until I get a replacement which is on order.. Lets hope that was the problem all along.. Also on Monday I have another A4 arriving just one piece @ 136Mhs with control board. So that will put me around 400Mhs.. These A4s are going to be a hit. Way better then the A2. I expect to start seeing many come on line.. I got mine before the pre-order group.. So they are just now starting to roll in.. Be ready
Ok thanks and I wrote Chris a PM about the failing router. So we are in a waiting mode.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I have not tried the g=off because today it was doing well but after about 2 hours it starts dropping hash rate. Does not make since. I will try g=off right now and report back.. I do notice 80 percent of the time it seems I am only mining Gamcredit it always comes back to game credit. Don't know if that means anything. OK going to reboot now with g=off as hash rate has dropped again. The restarts seem to be much better now so if all g=off is effecting is restarts that is not the issue

That's all g=off would affect, so most likely it will not cause you increased hashrate in that case. I didn't think it would solve the problem anyway, but it was worth a shot.

Get back to Chris with the exact times the problem is occurring and he'll try to cross-reference what was going on in the database to see if any of the errors are pertinent to you.

Hi Steve I wrote Chis last night.. It seems my router has gone out completely. I am dead in the water on the A4 until I get a replacement which is on order.. Lets hope that was the problem all along.. Also on Monday I have another A4 arriving just one piece @ 136Mhs with control board. So that will put me around 400Mhs.. These A4s are going to be a hit. Way better then the A2. I expect to start seeing many come on line.. I got mine before the pre-order group.. So they are just now starting to roll in.. Be ready
Ok thanks and I wrote Chris a PM about the failing router. So we are in a waiting mode.

I'm sorry to hear about the router. At least that provides an explanation as to why others weren't encountering this problem.

You might want to do the math on this and just go to a store and buy the router as soon as possible. Even though routers are $20 cheaper online, you would probably lose $50 in revenue by waiting for it to arrive.

[tradewiz]

I have not tried the g=off because today it was doing well but after about 2 hours it starts dropping hash rate. Does not make since. I will try g=off right now and report back.. I do notice 80 percent of the time it seems I am only mining Gamcredit it always comes back to game credit. Don't know if that means anything. OK going to reboot now with g=off as hash rate has dropped again. The restarts seem to be much better now so if all g=off is effecting is restarts that is not the issue

That's all g=off would affect, so most likely it will not cause you increased hashrate in that case. I didn't think it would solve the problem anyway, but it was worth a shot.

Get back to Chris with the exact times the problem is occurring and he'll try to cross-reference what was going on in the database to see if any of the errors are pertinent to you.

Hi Steve I wrote Chis last night.. It seems my router has gone out completely. I am dead in the water on the A4 until I get a replacement which is on order.. Lets hope that was the problem all along.. Also on Monday I have another A4 arriving just one piece @ 136Mhs with control board. So that will put me around 400Mhs.. These A4s are going to be a hit. Way better then the A2. I expect to start seeing many come on line.. I got mine before the pre-order group.. So they are just now starting to roll in.. Be ready
Ok thanks and I wrote Chris a PM about the failing router. So we are in a waiting mode.

I am having the same issues as you with dropping hash rate. On Litecoinpool the units are stable around 265 MH. Working on different solutions now and will share when I get some conclusions. You may know it already but one control board can be used on 3 units, while they supply a control board for every 2 units.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I'm trying to figure out the best settings for these miners this morning.

One point someone brought to my attention is that if you set any miner to a high difficulty, the reported hashrate on the site will vary from what the miner says due to luck in finding shares. If you were to set d=1024, the difference should be minimal. If it gets worse, then that may be indicative of a pool bug.

I'll report on more information after I do more research over the next few hours.

[Steve Sokolowski]

That's all g=off would affect, so most likely it will not cause you increased hashrate in that case. I didn't think it would solve the problem anyway, but it was worth a shot.

Get back to Chris with the exact times the problem is occurring and he'll try to cross-reference what was going on in the database to see if any of the errors are pertinent to you.

Hi Steve I wrote Chis last night.. It seems my router has gone out completely. I am dead in the water on the A4 until I get a replacement which is on order.. Lets hope that was the problem all along.. Also on Monday I have another A4 arriving just one piece @ 136Mhs with control board. So that will put me around 400Mhs.. These A4s are going to be a hit. Way better then the A2. I expect to start seeing many come on line.. I got mine before the pre-order group.. So they are just now starting to roll in.. Be ready
Ok thanks and I wrote Chris a PM about the failing router. So we are in a waiting mode.

I am having the same issues as you with dropping hash rate. On Litecoinpool the units are stable around 265 MH. Working on different solutions now and will share when I get some conclusions. You may know it already but one control board can be used on 3 units, while they supply a control board for every 2 units.

I did some research into this and determined that exactly half the shares you would expect to be submitted are being submitted by these miners. At first, it sends all the shares, and then the share frequency gets cut in half. Since the hashrate is a 2h average, it appears to decline over the course of 2h when the drop was actually instantaneous.

There are a few possibilities for this that I think everyone should try, and depending on what is found, this fix may be a pool software bug, a miner configuration issue, or a defective miner.

The first theory is that these miners are "forgetting" the current difficulty and getting stuck at a previous difficulty setting. The pool only sends difficulty settings when a new difficulty is required, but perhaps these miners missed the difficulty set message. The broken router or some other connection problem would cause this problem by dropping packets. The result would be that the miners think the difficulty is twice as high as the pool does, and therefore they withhold shares that they should be paid for. The issue is more likely to occur here because the difficulty never changes at a litecoin-only pool.

To try to resolve this problem, there are several choices. The first is to try omitting the "d=" password argument, so that the difficulty gets changed by the system more often. The other is to try setting "d=32768," because all of the miners I've seen this issue with have their difficulty setting at 65536. Perhaps 32768 is the setting that these miners use as default when they miss an override setting. If the problem improves, then I will modify the software to send the same difficulty every 2m to all miners, so that the longest this issue could possibly occur for is 2m instead of permanently.

Another possibility is that one of the boards in the miner goes offline because of a hardware fault. The shares coming out of the miner would drop by half, and we would see the same statistics reported, but the cause would be a hardware error. This would be a more likely cause if it's always the same miners causing the problem every time.